Cosmopolis… “is concerned with the fundamental issue of the historical process. ….
The business of cosmopolis is to make operative the ideas that, in the light of the general bias of common sense, are inoperative.” Bernard Lonergan; CWL 3, University of Toronto Press, 1992. Page 263-4[239]

INTRODUCTION

The Halifax N.S. gathering of July 6-10, 2009 focused on the topic “Functional Collaboration” in the sense meant by Lonergan in chapter 5 of Method in Theology. The focus was an amateurish version of the
reflections that are to identify the group that is eventually to emerge as the members of the eighth functional specialty, called by Lonergan Communications but variously titled by others as Executive Reflection,
Marketing, etc. Whatever title is to emerge as relatively definite, the properties of the operations of the group are those identified in section (8) of Method in Theology, p. 132.

The operations can also be associated with a part of the role to be played by “implementation’ in metaphysics, considered by Lonergan as a “conception, affirmation and implementation”. What became clear to
the group was that this area of metaphysics has been neglected since the emergence of Insight. So, conception and affirmation, components
of a larger implementation, were being carried forward without the feedback benefit of the concrete implementation identified above by (8), the
result being a contraction of the original challenge intended by Lonergan in his reflections on Cosmopolis.

The implementation meant by the Halifax group, then, relates to the ad extra effectiveness of metaphysics, to the challenge of Cosmopolis, to the
institutional realization of functional collaboration. This website is a place of virtual collaboration through the provision of a manner by which researchers
can assist each other in the implementation of collaborative work.

Lonergan’s concern for the historical process produced over three decades [1935-1965] three central ideas that are still inoperative. In chronological
summary, he provided an analysis of the business cycle, an analysis of the structure of human knowing, and an eight-fold method designed to implement
his first two ideas. It is on this third discovery that this society is focused. The commitment is to support the initiation of functional collaboration in the
various sciences, arts and technologies in a way that would lead to a new integral global care for evolutionary progress.